What are we going to do tonight, Brain?

Same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world!

A simple yet brilliant storytelling device. Core, classical elements of drama. Man versus man. Evil archetype endeavours to take over the world; perky protag thwarts said-takeover. From Harry Potter to Shakespeare to Star Wars to every episode of Scooby-Doo, some bastard is trying to make it reign evil and it's up to a few benevolent souls - always with great hair - to save mankind. Pretty standard fare. Purge the pernicious pests so we all can get back to normal life and our frisée salads and Shiraz at Nordstron Café. Yet ... what to do when that evil genius is your own kid? Ah, well. Therein lies the rub.

Marge Simpson knows the harrows of a difficult child. Rosemary had severe misgivings about her Baby. You know Hitler's Mütti must have questioned her First Five interactions with the twee, finger-painting, mustachioed Adolf. Even as recently as FOX's recently-cancelled Sleepy Hollow, Katrina Van Tassel shouldered the emotional weight of an apocalyptic offspring: Henry Parrish, wingman to Moloch. So follows the pathos-laced saga of Dr. Cassandra Railly and her precocious tyke, a.k.a. The Witness: prophet of the Apocalypse and demon wrangler of the Four Horsemen. Awww, but he looks so peaceful when he sleeps.

SyFy's 12 Monkeys is back swinging on the top branch for another season and it's a well-heeled, time-travel itinerary through multiple era, including a grimy yet velveteen Medieval period, a lusty, luxe Baroque spell, post-War Paris' theatre scene - where Emily Hampshire's bonkers Jennifer Goines is a gorgeous study in nut-job perfection - and even the, relatively, boring 1980s.

S3e1, titled "Mother", sets Mama Cass on a new quest, crossing the boundaries of time, space and sartorial permutations to confront her demon seed: as a full-grown man and, in a clearly more complex, philosophical and moral haze, to contemplate the actual, iffy occasion of his birth.

12 Monkeys, "Mother" S3e1 Amanda Schull as Dr. Cassie Railly Photo by: Ben Mark Holzberg/Syfy

The Bad Seed is nothing new. Greek, Roman and Norse mythologies are replete with the mother-as-vessel-for-evil device. Greek myth gave us Echidna: the Mother of all Monsters. To that end, time-travel is also an ancient idea. Norse saga tell of the Three Norns: three women who alone control destiny, via time travel. However, the Norse view of time follows not a direct, linear course, but a cyclical one.

Present returns to the past, past is altered; present is now altered, having absorbed the altered past ... and so on. Similar to the Germanic languages, there is no future tense, per se; there is only the contingent possibility of a future. As with the Norsemen, Cassie's future is contingent upon what happened, or will happen, in the past ... or, the present ... or, ... wait. It is a constant Butterfly Effect, in effect. (Note the various butterfly imagery throughout the series, notably butterfly jewelry.)

"To call past and future to the rescue of the present," thus spake the experimental physicists of Chris Marker's post-WWIII, dystopian, French film La Jetée (1962), the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's mindf#&% film starring a magnificently twisted Brad Pitt, 12 Monkeys (1995).  Gilliam's Brad Pitt vehicle is, in turn, the basis for the legend's latest iteration, SyFy's 12 Monkeys (2015).

In the current Monkey tale, James Cole (Aaron Stanford) travels to our present, from his future date of 2043. It is then The Army of the Twelve Monkeys releases (released? will release? will have released? will have had released?) a plague that wipes out most of humanity. In our present, he meets Dr. Cassie Railly, a virologist whom he believes can eradicate this future minesweep. However, it seems the Monkey Corps and its diabolical leader, The Witness (Mommy's Little Numnum), have more vile deeds to carry out and it's up to our Dystopian Duo, Cassie and Cole, to travel hither and thither, through time and space, to thwart those evil, evil monkeys so we can all get back to our refreshing, summer salads and wine.

No matter the outcome, you've got time to bring out your dead. 12 Monkeys S4 has already been greenlit (will be greenlighted? will have had been greenlitten?), a rare security before the previous season even airs. To boot, S3 proffers the illustrious Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future, The Addams Family, Taxi) - eternally Uncle Fester to some of us - in a guest-starring role as Zalmon Shaw, sociopathic and sadistic Dir. of Recruitment and Membership for The Monkey Club. (Membership is free, but initiation is pure hell.)

The end of the world could eventually come. So, mark your calendar, kids, and find yourself a nice, purple track suit on eBay. Friday May 19, 2017, the quest for world domination resumes on SyFy. 12 Monkeys S3 airs in one epic, weekend "binge-a-thon": all ten S3 episodes from Friday 5/19 - Sunday 5/21, airing 8p.m. - 11p.m. ET/PT each night. In case mankind is wiped out by a plague, it's a good thing you get to watch the whole season this weekend.

In the meanwhile, for your reading pleasure, I chatted with Aaron Stanford (James Cole) and Amanda Schull (Dr. Cassie) about their roles, the writers' inspirations and Jennifer Goines' 99 Luftballons.

12 Monkeys, "Masks" S3e8 Aaron Stanford as Jame Cole, Amanda Schull as Cassandra Railly

Photo by: Dusan Martincek/Syfy

Interview with Aaron Stanford (James Cole) and amanda Schull (Dr. Cassandra Railly)

Monkey Interview Date: May 12, 2017 9:00 am PST

Please note: Transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity, only where JennyPop! questions are concerned. Talent answers are transcribed here in full. 

JennyPop!: Good morning! So I have a question and your answer might be largely based on your relationship with your writers because it’s more of a writer-oriented question.

But I noticed as a viewer, I see a lot of parallels between your storylines and classical mythology, primarily Norse and Greek. I was wondering if the writers talk to you about some of their inspirations for different characters. I’m thinking of the Norse characters, the Three Norns. They are three women who control destiny and I sort of see them in Cassie, Jennifer, and Magdalena. Basically, they follow not a linear timeline of mankind but a cyclical one, where they go from  present to past, change the past, and then re-enter a new present, which absorbed the changed past. It kind of just goes in cycles like that. And your storyline kind of speaks to me in that way.

Aaron Stanford: I’ll tell you what, if they’re not making allusion to that they should be. I don’t have the answer to that. I don’t know if they specifically used that myth. I know that they are influenced by mythology in general. You’ll definitely notice references to Greek mythology.

These guys are big genre and sci fi fans and most of the best sci fi is actually based on ancient mythology. A film franchise like Star Wars is known as the Birth of Modern Mythology. All these rules for storytelling were laid out in the poetics and they sort of adhere to these same rules and that’s just what good storytelling is. So I do not have an answer to that question – whether or not that specific myth comes into play – but I know the writers definitely, definitely lean heavily on ancient mythology.

JennyPop!: Interesting because I wondered, and especially Amanda, as like the visual storytellers for the writers, do you kind of feel the, I don’t know, sort of the heft of legend to portray…. Like your character reminds me of Greek mythology's Echidna, who is the mother of all monsters. Your character makes me think of Echidna so I wonder, as a female lead in the series, and there are so many female characters of mythology that put the world on its axis – do you feel any of that in your character?

Amanda Schull: Absolutely. Well Aaron is right that the writers are very influenced by Greek mythology. If you even consider my character’s name, they changed it from the movie which was Kathryn Railly, or Reynolds, I believe. I can’t remember her last name, but they changed Kathryn to Cassandra of the Greek myth. And that was a particularly powerful storyline for Cassie in the first season –knowing the fate of the world and knowing what was going to happen and nobody listened to her.

And you’re right in that Cassie does have a lot of the strengths and weight, similar to Greek mythology, on her shoulders throughout the entire season. But I would go further to say that it’s the women in the show, the female roles that these men, these male writers, have created that allow the weight to shift from one character to the next.

But in particular for these women, allowing them strength that is often reserved for male characters is of particular fascination to me, and flattery as well. And it also just really works with the mythology of our personal show but of course is also very strong in Greek mythology as well.

JennyPop!: Clearly. I like to observe the subtext within the show and I see a lot more under the water, so to say, than when I first started watching. So I am enjoying it and, Season 3 episode 2, Jennifer’s character’s performance is just spectacular! I absolutely love - j'adore! Her "99 Luftballons" is fantastic – so, a fantastic show.

Amanda Schull: We’ll pass that along to her!

JennyPop!: Great, thank you very much. Have a wonderful afternoon, thank you.

Amanda Schull: Thank you, you too.

Aaron Stanford: Thanks.

JennyPop!: Bye-bye!

12 Monkeys, "Guardians" S3e2 Emily Hampshire as Jennifer Goines Photo by Ben Mark Holzberg/Syfy

"Jennifer ... she's lost in time. Way back. Locked away somewhere inside that primary, pinball machine brain of hers is the answer to everything." - 12 Monkeys

12 MONKEYS

Production (Because credits are important, especially if you're listed. Stay for the credits, kids.)

Written by Terry Matalas, Travis Fickett, Janet Peoples and David Webb Peoples

Directed by David Grossman

Produced by Atlas Entertainment

Distributed by SyFy, NBCUniversal and Netflix

Cast

Amanda Schull as Dr. Cassie Railly

Aaron Stanford as James Cole

Emily Hampshire as Jennifer Goines

Kirk Acevedo as José Ramse

Barbara Sukowa as Katarina Jones

Todd Stashwick as Deacon

- Acclaimed guest stars joining S3 include Emmy winner Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future), Hannah Waddington ("Game of Thrones") and James Callis ("Battlestar Galactica").

@JennyPopCom @SyFy @12MonkeysSyFy @12MonkeysRoom

Based on the sci-fi mystery novels penned by James S.A. Corey (a nom de plume serving the endeavours of the writing team Daniel Abraham and Ty Franc, Leviathan Wakes) The Expanse titles have spread like flowering spores into a SyFy original series. Some two-hundred years in the future, a now-fully-habitable solar system serves as the ripe-for-rivalry mise-en-scène. Space provides the optimum landscape, especially space under colonial administration, to host not one, but all three classical conflicts of storytelling: man vs. man, man vs. nature, and man vs. himself.

It is in this expanse where a new breed of mankind operates in roughly the same rigid, egocentric and tenuous fashion that ancient mankind did when Earth was, essentially, his only domain; yet, now there is more territory to cover and more peoples to monitor, and control. If resources, greed, logistics, prejudices, power trips and egos proved existential beasties on one planet, whilst the endgame may remain the same when dealing with an entire solar system, the wider struggle proves a significant hurdle.

In The Expanse, dominant Earthlings, militant Martians and second-class Belters (those living and working in space, in the asteroid belt) clash like Real Housewives thrown together at a theme party. As the humans delicately co-exist, the United Nations - yes, still in "action" - persuades against a roiling warfare burgeoning between Earth and Mars, under the auspices of violet-cloaked U.N. exec Chrisjen Avasarala (played regally by Shohreh Aghdashloo whom, if you know your Portlandia, will recognize her from S2e3 as the visiting author at Women and Women First.).

In these potentially warring skies, Captain James Holden (Steven Strait) and his skeleton crew of the ice trawler Canterbury face a more immediate concern: who blew up their ship? Fortunately, Holden and his crew were saved from annihilation, as they all happened to be on a (set-up?) distress call, on-board a Canterbury short-range shuttle. So, who killed the Cant? The offending machine was a stealth vessel. Who has the funds for, and access to, a stealth vessel. The war-happy Martians, of course ... or was it?

Whilst scouring the colonies for the real Canterbury destroyer, Captain Holden and his stragglers, Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper), Alex Kamal (Cas Anvar) and Amos Burton (Wes Chatham), are hired by Outer Planets Alliance (OPA): a quasi-terrorist organization fighting for the rights of the second-class Belters. Their mission? To find a missing compatriot, one Lionel Polanski. On their travels, in their new ship, Rocinante, they locate the very vessel that took out the Cant: the Anubis. A seemingly abandoned ghostship, there's plenty of life in the old girl yet. The Anubis is festering with "spiraling layers of an amorphous, glassy, blue-green mass, clutching the reactor like a strangler fig". A self-aware protomolecule, the Phoebe Bug, as it were.

Elsewhere, a young, wealthy scion named Julie Mao goes missing. On the case is hard-living, self-damaged Det. Joe Miiller (Thomas Jane). When it is learned she is, in fact, OPA-sympathizer Lionel Polanski, Miller follows her alias until he finds she is registered at the Blue Falcon Hotel, as Polanski. Oddly, she is covered in the same Phoebe Bug that took control of the Anubis. The spaceship that killed the Cant and the disappearance and bizarre death of Julie Mao/Lionel Polanski can't be related ... or can they?

As with any quality, conspiracy-heavy sci-fi series, the simple, seemingly unrelated elements of a workaday spaceship, a self-aware, extra-terrestrial protomolecule and a dead, Phoebed, rich girl must be connected, and all via top-level, high-stakes, interplanetary, 23rdC. battle for air and water ... or must they?

San Diego Comic-Con 2016 and the good folks at SyFy afforded Yours Truly a seat at The Expanse roundtable, for a bit of chat and interview with the series' cast and writers. When I asked exec producers/writers Mark Fergus and Naren Shankar for a hint of what's to come in S2, specifically the self-aware Phoebe Bug, I was given a deftly crafted non-answer and, as the picture shows, a couple of Paddington Bear-style "very hard stares".

Jennifer Devore: Obviously, you can't give any direct hints as to the next season, but ... in the beginning of next season, will the origins of the discovery, of the spores or matrix, will that be divulged, or, and I apologize f it sounds like I'm asking a derivative question, but will it be similar to something like "Helix" or "The X-Files", where, like, the black oil becomes its own character throughout season after season ... or, will it be solved right away?

Naren Shankar: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going to get some answers for sure. No question about that. But, like the books, what it does is, it keeps changing. So, you can't ask anybody questions about that! You have to figure it out.

Mark Fergus: One of the joys of the books is it takes you, you know, three books before you really understand what this thing is. But it is something v specific, the mystery of it is ... there's no reason to put yourself in the shoes of your characters, trying to figure out what it is. Ultimately it does become its own character in the sense that it's become the elephant in the room for humanity. It's the new thing we have to grapple with. But, this show is about how does a new, game-changing technology change humanity? It is always about people. it's not about this thing. The thing never becomes more important than how do people  ... deal with ... a new reality, given that it now exists.

Jennifer Devore: Whiich is very apropos to current events.

Mark Fergus: Absolutely. This show is about people. The beauty of the books is, it never starts to say, "Oh, this thing is so cool, let's leave our people behind and follow this cool, interesting, game-changing thing." The story is about how our guys are going to survive and react to that. That will always be our focus.

The Expanse S1 streams on Amazon beginning December 2016; S2 starts on SyFy January 2017. Need a little S2 tease? Voila!

{youtube width="580" height="380"}3gj8tRaFIfs{/youtube}

The Expanse

Creators

Mark Fergus

Hawk Ostby

Executive producers

Naren Shankar

Mark Fergus

Andrew Kosove

Sharon Hall

Sean Daniel

Jason F. Brown

Hawk Ostby

Broderick Johnson

Producer

Lynn Baynor

Prod. Companies

Penguin in a Parka

SeanDanielCo

Alcon Entertainment

Distributor

NBC Universal TV Dist.

Original Network

SyFy

Read Jennifer Susannah Devore's) previous SDCC/SyFy roundtables with the cast and writers of Helix: So Many Monkeys and It Ain't Easy Being Human: SyFy Interviews

JennyPop’s other fave places to lurk online?

@JennyPopCom

Instagram

JennyPop.net

jenniferdevore.blogspot.com

amazon.com/author/jenniferdevore

#SDCC2016 #The Expanse #SyFy

“Comic-Con is the one time of the year when all nerds can set aside their personal opinions and focus on their petty differences … ”

-Will Arnett

Two Daphnes: post-apocalyptic and classic. Photo: JSDevore

Cheers, kittens! ‘Tis July and that means Comic-Con in these here parts! Final touches to costumes, triple-confirming hotel reservations, extra days at the gym and squirreling away all the forgotten pocket-dough you find doing laundry. Oh, wait … how rude of me. You didn’t get a badge? You’re not attending San Diego Comic-Con (San Diego Convention Center, July 21 – 24, 2016)? Oh, dear. Well, in that case …

Cheers, kittens! If you'll kindly check your calendars, you'll see it's summertime and if you regularly follow the scribblings and adventures of Dr. Lucy Devereaux and Moi, you'll know summer here in sunny San Diego means just one thing: San Diego Comic-Con!

Summertime lists of entertainment alternatives for the geeky and the pale put SDCC firmly on top of the pile. It's air-conditioned fun where we ghosties and our fellow friends of pasty pallor can hide from the vile sun and retain our dewy freshness. It's a venue where geeks, dorks and nerds of every shade of pale can gather in costume, greedily clutching their comic books and collectible figures whilst dork-walking at revved speeds to snag front-row seats to panels such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Action Figure Showcase and I Can't Write, I Can't Draw, But I Love Comics!, all without fear of a wedgie anytime during the day ... as long as conventioneers don't wander too far into the neighboring Gaslamp District. The Gaslamp is no place for a lone nerd in costume, especially at night when the surfy sportos, apathetic hipsters and sloshed beach thugs roam, and own, the darkness. Travel in nerd packs if you must; but be assured, like any Star Trek exploratory mission, the one in the red shirt will be sacrificed. Don't be the red shirt.

For all you poor mooks whom did not make it to San Diego Comic-Con 2012, or did and possibly lost, tossed or neglected your coveted Official Souvenir Book, unaware of the gems contained therein, I feel sad that you missed out on my Tarzan article. You should feel bad; it was good enough to garner me a personal invitation to meet the one, the only Dr. Jane Goodall! Where? A banquet in Tarzana, of course! (Long-time readers might recall my Disney methods used to inspire the finished product.) Well, no worries, jelly beans! There’s still time to mend your silly ways. Swing on over to my tree, grab a Sailor Jerry Banana Hammock and read my article here!

As of late, the adventure-lit of Edgar Rice Burroughs has captured my interest with a pleasant focus. The travel narratives of 19thC. adventurers have forever suited me well: Mark Twain, Richard Henry Dana, Charles Darwin, Henry James and Thomas Jefferson with his 18thC. accounts of Italian and French sojourns. To that end, contemporary travel essayists fill a healthy portion of our nearly 2,000 volume library: Bill Bryson, Peter Mayle, Hunter S. Thompson. Perhaps these travel writers and novelists have fueled my Wanderlust; perhaps I am drawn to them because of said-lust.

I have certainly been intrigued by adventure-lit since I first flipped through a fave and well-dogeared volume of Mom's 1940s  I Married Adventure by Martin and Osa Johnson. Tales of a 1930s power couple, he a photographer and contemporary of Jack London (another childhood fave of mine), she the devoted and steel-spined wife and protective riflewoman, they travelled South America and Africa well before the likes of Margaret Mead, Diane Fossey and Jane Goodall: all ladies whose works were also regular reading material about the house. (Mom was an anthropology major when I was wee and I suppose the lure of travel, questions of man's origins and the eternal quest for social knowledge set in early. Her degree was largely focused on Southeast Asian Studies; but I always thought it was Southy Station Studies, as in people who rode trains in the South. Silly girl.) Natch, I could go on here ad nauseum about all this twaddle, but I must save zee leetle grey zells' work for my current endeavour ... which brings me to the animal-loving Brit in the loin cloth.

Motivated by this year's themes for San Diego Comic-Con -for which I am anxiously awaiting press passes for the purposes of reporting from the convention floor for GoodtobeaGeek.com, as my alter ego/pseudonym Miss Hannah Hart, ghostdame- I have dipped my feathered quill and now sit pensively, pondering my submission to the official Souvenir Book, my inky nib aloft and hesitating just inches above my parchment. My theme of choice? The 100th anniversary of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes.

I utilize this casual canvas, similar to my previous post wherein I gathered some Savannah of Williamsburg thoughts -how to formulate my fourth book in this series- as a sounding board to crystallize some free-radical ideas in my noodle. It seems to be working; I feel the gears moving, like one of Dr. Lucia Devereaux's steampunk contraptions sputtering to life. (If you read Hannah, you'll know of Dr. Lucy.) Some of you may know I was published in the 2010 Comic-Con Book: lead story even for the 60th Anniversary of Peanuts segment! My task at hand this time is considerable. These Tarzan geeks are tough competition.

Now, being the weird combination of she whom reveres original fairy tales -Grimm (Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel und Gretel), de la Fontaine (The Grasshopper and the Ant, The Tortoise and the Hare), de Ségur (Blondine), etc.- yet also adores the Disney reiterations thereof, my Viking and I ventured to Disneyland to get my noggin revving and skittered amidst the branches of Tarzan's Treehouse in Adventureland. In fact, the attraction used to be the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse and far superior ... to the Tarzan Treehouse, not superior to the Robert Louis Stevenson book. Ha! It was a subtle homage of vintage suitcases, silver hairbrushes and antique china to the durable and genteel, accidental survivalists from the mind of the man from Edinburgh. Happily, some of the props have remained in place.

Once again, merci pour écouter, thanks for listening; I think I have some ideas brewing. I imagine, alongside reading more of Mr. Edgar Rice Burroughs, a few more trips through the treehouse may very well be in order.

Update to Post: I did indeed come up with an article for Comic-Con 2012 and it was published in the annual Souivernir Book. Read it here!

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